Just a little home office, that’s all I was doing. I have had this lofted space in my house I never could quite decide on how to use. It’s a wonderful space, but I always thought it was tricky to support decorating. You see it s on the second level of the house, lofted above the living room looking down. 2 of the “walls” of the room are railings, along the long railing wall across the living room width are big picture windows that look out over to the pond/lake (whatever they feel like calling it that day). Then you have a short wall that has another window to it and a long wall that is the other side of one of the bedrooms.
So how do you put furniture around this room to enjoy the view but also make it functional? I always thought to make it at one point another living/family room. You don’t want your back to the view/raining to face the wall but it doesn’t make sense to put some of the furniture against the wall. Such a conundrum.
When I moved back to my place about 6 years ago now, I just left it empty and made it more of a kitten play area. Their place to have meals and have some of their toys.
Why Now?
Now enter the bug to finally do something about the space. Well you see Antarctica put it officially in motion, specifically my friend Tim. Yes, I call him out and tell him he made me spend all sorts of money. How is it his fault? Well, I met Tim and his lovely wife Megan on our trip to Antarctica. They became my travel buddies. When Tim got home, he, like I did, got to editing our scores of photos from our trip. He had a spare bedroom and went one weekend to get a desk to make a proper editing spot.
Hmm… awhile back I purchased a dedicated monitor to edit but it sat in the corner of my living room. My current editing setup was me sitting on the couch with my laptop. At some point I need to start taking my photography more seriously and set up a proper editing spot. The couch, while comfy and feeding into my need of needing white noise (tv) background, faced inwards and all of my lovely picture windows letting in the light (I love, love, love bright homes with natural light) would shine upon my screen and would make it difficult to edit during certain times a day, made much much worse in summer when the sun is awake and visiting us for 18+ hours of the day.
So maybe it was time to get a desk and set about to making the loft area into an office space, a proper editing spot. So desk looking I started. Pinterest is a dangerous place. I couldn’t set on a desk looking online, I figured well maybe I’ll just start with Ikea and see what they have. I don’t know about you but with furniture I need to see things, touch things. The more I go through life I realize I am very texture and touch driven; I need to see how things feel to like it. It isn’t just hey it looks nice; it has to feel nice and things need to be comfortable.
Well I found a desk I thought I could live with, then scope creep started to set in. You can’t just have a desk in the space, it will feel barren, and again I know if I am going to make actual use of the space, I need some creature comforts and white noise distractions, etc. I puttered around the store thinking maybe a couch or a comfy chair in the space would work as well. Here is where the bigger problem started. Remember a year or so back when Phase 1 of the house update started. Well I custom ordered a couch at that time, and I found that once you go to nice, high quality items it is hard to go back. Now I am not knocking items from Ikea (I did just get a desk from there) but I don’t expect some of their furniture pieces to be long lasting and again going back to the texture/comfort side of things it wasn’t meeting to what I was seeking.
I darted off to the furniture store I procured items from before, my workplace offers me a very nice healthy discount there. I was immediately drawn to a chair I saw from across the room, it was comfy and better yet it is an unassuming recliner. Then I found a nice comfy loveseat and a table, I was thinking that maybe the table might be a good desk space as well. Sometimes you need to see items in the space to figure out what will work and won’t. Good news is that with the delivery of items it is easy to immediately return on delivery so I didn’t feel stressed about making the decision at this point. It was a bonus that that weekend they were running a deal with a $20 donation to the charity they were supporting I could actually get a bigger discount than what my company offered. Sign me on the dotted line and go.
We set the delivery date for the furniture and I sat back and waited. I decided not to setup the desk I purchased from Ikea until all of the furniture arrived in case I wanted to return that in favor of the other items. All of the creative decorating juices started to flow from there. Pinterest and Amazon became good friends with me as I ordered items that I thought would become what I was now affectionately calling my editing suite, it sounds much fancier than an office.
Scope Creep!
Well the furniture delivery date was getting closer so I started to assess how I would set things up. Horrible mockup drawings from me, much better drawings from my sister started to pull together what would be the space but drew my attention that those big lovely picture windows. Well they haven’t been properly cleaned in years, and even then it was more of a spray with the hose as I can’t reach it from the inside and I don’t have a big ladder to get up to them from the outside.
I knew that when I started sitting up there that would be the first thing that would drive me nuts, so as winter was winding down (kinda) it was a good time to get a crew over to give them a good scrub down. Funny how when they washed the outside I didn’t see much of a difference and thought they may need to do a second round; they even thought the same but they came inside and cleaned them and that is where the big difference happened. Now the kittens can bird watch in HD!
Ugh, now the next thing is drawn to my attention. Well I am WAY overdue on painting. This room in particular is probably the worst, when I lived in California I rented out my place, my tenants took good care of my place but they had little ones and normal wear and tear caused a few spots on the wall to need to be touched up. Touched up they did, but the color they chose while close to the color it was not an exact match and all you can see are huge swathes of variation of color. It probably would have been easier for them to repaint the whole wall but they just hit the spots. Since I hadn’t really used the room it didn’t bother me that much and put it off until I was going to enter into Phase 2 of the house, but now that the editing suite is underway I cannot put this off any longer. Phase 2 will wait but this wall can be painted now.
I hate painting, it is not my strong suite. I do love the end result but the whole process seems tedious and I don’t like it. Since I don’t like it and consider it a chore, I try to do it as quickly as possible which means I am sloppy with it. I stepped in the paint, it got all over me, in my hair, on the floor, on the ceiling, but eventually we did get some on the wall and it was nice to have things freshened up.
Scope creep quickly set in. I was going to just paint the one wall. I had extra paint and a little bit of time so 2 other small walls were added in. Still some leftover paint was available and now the previous beige while on the first floor was only in the guest bathroom upstairs and instead of having now 4+ colors upstairs I figured I may as well get the beige out of the second floor and get the bathroom painted as well.
Editing Suite Setup
Furniture Delivery Day! It was scheduled for a Friday, the day before my birthday in fact. I sat at home patiently waiting for the delivery, anxious to get the space underway. This was my birthday present to myself after all, since I wasn’t traveling this year.
The minutes and hours kept ticking by, the delivery window was upon us but of course, it wasn’t until 30 minutes after the window that the delivery truck arrived. I had the room and furniture measured and was already concerned that there was going to be too much in the space, but you do need to see it to truly see what will work. In comes the chair, the table, the loveseat (with all of its cushions and pillows), then they tried to bring in another couch. Um…. No, they said they had it on the order for a coach with the loveseat but in fact I did not order this so I stopped them before they even brought that into the house. The second the table was put in, I knew this would be a no go, so back onto the truck it went.
Now seeing the loveseat in, I was questioning that as well, it takes up so much more room than I remembered. But I decided to sit with it for a few days. Since I knew the table wasn’t going to work it was official that the desk needed to come out of the back of my car and up the stairs for assembly.
Desk is in, the couch and chair with the desk really wasn’t going to work but which to go. If I kept the chair I could easily move that into a bedroom or downstairs but the couch needed an official answer. It was soooo comfy though it was hard to say no to it, and with the discount I had, it seemed a shame to waste it.
By the next morning I decided the couch was going to have to go, the vision of the space wasn’t going to work with the couch. I tried to see if any friends needed it before I called to return it but no takers came about. I would have to live with it in the space due to the time of year the delivery people weren’t able to schedule a pickup for weeks out. Apparently a lot of people were ordering new furniture for Easter and I had to wait until after for an opening in the delivery schedule for the undelivery.
So, the editing space finalization and reveal would have to wait until then. Anyways back to Saturday after the initial delivery, it was my birthday and the space still needed to be sorted out. I had some furniture pieces downstairs that I always thought would work upstairs and a good item to set a tv on. I took about dragging furniture up and down the stairs to see what would work. Now I was by myself but I wasn’t going to let that slow me down. I am a little stubborn that way, it was heavy but not super heavy it was bulkier than anything else so it really was a 2 person job but I just worked it out. Up and down things went resulting in quite a bit of bruising on my part.
A target run was thrown into the mix, a little bit of decorating started about and then I realized my first problem with the decorating idea. The kittens love to be near, next to and or on me the bulk of the time. I hadn’t thought about the cat factor!!!! Sitting at the desk with my temporary folding chair (ouch that gets uncomfortable for long bouts of time), they had no where to go except for being on the desk and what a better place to be than to sit right in front of the monitor. Thankfully I had time to replan the space and make necessary adjustments to account for the cats, but since the space wouldn’t be finished for weeks my sights got set on a new motivation.
Editing Suite Finalization
Now it isn’t done done, but it is done for now. I have it mostly where I want it to be and the rest will come in time. The space is functional, relaxing, and most importantly it serves its purpose. I have used it quite frequently now and feel much more inspired to do things I have been putting off on the photography side.
The biggest thing that is needed is I need to print out some of my work and get it up on the walls in this space and across the entire house. The kitten factor has been now accounted for and they have a little space to sit next to me, occasionally they get onto the desk but they seem to like to snooze in their new spot when I am working. Even better news is that their play area stayed mostly in take as they can maintain their toys out in the open space, but I think the big tunnel will move out into the guest bedroom to free up the area rug.
While the editing suite was underway, I did some much-needed revamping of my website as well. I never really cared for how it looked originally but it got things done until I could figure out how I wanted it to look and do the things I wanted it to do. So, while I had downtime in the midst of the home makeover I made over the website as well. There will be some fine tuning there as well but it is mostly where I want it for now.
I have to remind myself that sometimes “Done is better than perfect”, if I waited until it was 100% perfect on everything in general things would never get done but getting it close is a great way to start and much like the editing suite remodel you may think of things along the way you didn’t account for (like the kitten factor) or want to tweak in a new direction. It’s better to make small course corrections along the way versus wait until its done and realize you need to go the opposite way.
Now I just need to figure out how to get the kittens from jumping up onto the railing and balance beaming their way across, it gives me heart palpitations every time.
